A bill that will make it more difficult for insurers to retroactively cancel individual policies because of errors or omissions on the original application — a practice known as rescission. Insurers say this is essential to fighting fraud, but the industry came under criticism in California for canceling the policies of sick people who said they made honest mistakes on their applications.

A bill that cracks down on balance billing by emergency-room doctors. If a patient with insurance is treated by an out-of-network emergency physician, the doc can collect a standard co-pay or co-insurance payment, but can’t bill the patient for the portion of the charge that the insurer refuses to pay. This practice, known as balance billing, has been around for decades. Many states have laws against it in certain circumstances, but it’s still pretty common.

Comments (5 of 22)

Hospital-acquired contagions account for about one half of all hospital complications. Therefore, we are dealing with a problem on a massive scale.

There are two basic pieces to learning the cause and control of this dilemma: (1) It is the nature of the beast - infected people go to hospitals because that is where they need to be. (2) Human behavior plays the largest role in the spread of infectious organisms.

There are identifiable standards of care to prevent the spread of communicable diseases in hospitals and to prevent infections of various parts of the body arising from sloppy technique. This is an area of provable negligence that often goes unnoticed.

2:34 pm September 8, 2008

medical biller wrote :

To address ThunderRoad and Pinko obviously you have no idea how much it costs to run a office. This is one of the few industries where inflation has a huge effect on a private practice. Our staff salaries are increased, electricity, malpractice insurance, rent and so on. As I'm sure your not aware the most insurance base their payments off of what Medicare pays and this year alone we faced a 10% decrease in payments which congress has haulted for the time being. So our costs go up each year and our reimbursement goes down. You do the math. If we choose to be O.O.N with an insurance and a patient is seen in an emergency basis they should pay us our entire billed amount. It's not like we go out looking for these patients so we can make some extra money. The doctors do care about the patients otherwise they wouldn't be on call and willing to see the patients. Trust me their not going to ask if a patient has insurance before they start treating them.

12:46 pm September 8, 2008

to the entitled wrote :

I quit when medicine was placed under state control, some years ago….Do you know what it takes to perform surgery? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent or the conditions of my world, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything – except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire, or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only to serve. That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards – never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind – yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table, under my hands. Their moral code has taught them to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue that I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe if he is the sort of man who resents it – and still less safe if he is the sort who doesn’t….”

ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand (1957)

5:22 pm September 7, 2008

ThunderRoad wrote :

Just stop hosing sick people less fortunate than you. If you want to make a fortune, you should have gone into finance, not medicine. Stop taking advantage of sick people who don't have a choice. That's really what this is all about. Spare me the billing rationlizations. You make a joke out of your oath.

3:28 pm September 7, 2008

distressed pinko wrote :

What a horrible wake-up call you are all so happy to publicize. I'm so saddened to see that today's doctors concerns are little for the patient and more concentrated on interest in financial gains. To think of medical care as a free market practice is nauseating, how is your scalpel so much more precious than another's? I feel the rate of MRSA infection should be a much greater concern and you should stop wasting you time bickering on the blog-o-sphere. Also I recommend a grammar/spell check before posting. How is anyone to expect you earned a PhD?